This was a gorgeous forest stand to work and photograph in, and, unfortunately, a bit of an oddity to find such large, old aspens left out on the landscape. My goal printing this image was to preserve the subtlety of tone and light & shadow, but still capture some of the brilliance of this stand in the early morning light.

A good friend of mine, an old BC Parks naturalist, shared with me the following short verse that I am always reminded of when I come across ferns like the ones in this photo:
Fringing the stream at every turn,
Swing lo’ the waving fronds of fern.
From strong cleft and mossy sod,
Pale asters spring, and goldenrod!

It’s a great little rhyme, and the exclamation mark that Al added at the end captures the feeling of coming across one of these little spots just perfectly. Try to get out this weekend, and find one of these for yourself!

Speaking of shutter speeds and water texture, for this image I used a fast shutter speed (1/640th sec at f/8) to freeze the motion of the falling water. It’s interesting to me that you can see how the water was accelerating as it fell—the texture gets blurrier near the bottom of the fall. I also like how the texture of the water matches the patterns in the rock faces surrounding the falls.

For printing this photo, I tried to make sure to retain detail in the shadows and in the highlights while maintaining the high-contrast nature of the scene. In the final print I did notice the highlights wash out just a bit in one spot of water (far right, about 2/3rds down), and when I checked the image on my monitor it also showed almost no detail, although it was not quite clipped. Funny how I didn’t notice it as a problem on-screen, but it stood out in the print immediately. Lesson learned…

I’ve always liked this photograph, and the memory of the day that I took it (which often confounds a photographer’s ability to tell if a photo’s any good or not). I’ve even written a post about this image before (which you can read here). Even so, I’ve never printed it, so I figured this Daily Print project was just the excuse I needed.

Bonus questions for this post: +1 point if you can tell me the sex of the bird, +5 points for the subspecies, and +50 points if you can tell me the age (hint: click the image to view it full size, and remember that this photo was taken in May…)

In August 2008 I was working for the Canadian Forest Service, doing research in pine stands west of Edmonton. I made this photo after leaving from work for the weekend and driving through Jasper on the way to a friend’s wedding in northern BC. I could see the light getting good as I got closer to the park and, after a speeding ticket in Edson (d-oh!), I had a terrific evening making many images that I was really happy with. This Daily Print project that I’m trying out is a great excuse to look back into my archives to find these images that I’ve kind of forgotten about. Watch for more photos from this August evening in the next few weeks…

I’ve noticed that I make a greater proportion of black-and-white images than I tend to print—so I’m going to try to correct that. I took this photograph the same weekend as this photo (it was a great weekend).

And, although it’s not an uncommon technique in landscape photography (especially of waterfalls), I also haven’t experimented much with slow shutter speeds and flowing water, although a fellow Edmonton photographer, Joel Koop (see an example of his work here), has inspired me to try more.

I made this photograph back in August of 2008 on a beautiful, calm morning at Beaverhill Lake but which didn’t last long—by mid-morning the clouds had completely rolled in, and I proceeded with getting soaked (all part of the experience).

I printed this photo today, as the first two prints (here and here) in my Daily Print project (explained here) were both highly-detailed, finely textured images with bold colours, so I thought I’d try something different, and a little out of the ordinary for me. It was interesting to see the finished print—the colours turned out great, but let’s say I need to practice printing more soft-textured images… (that’s what this whole exercise is about though, I guess, and I’m having fun doing it too)